CCS Leeds Ltd provides leased lines, ethernet first mile (EFM),hosting services, VoIP telephone lines, technical support and a wide range of other services. We are also human beings and this blog is a regular account of who we are and the kind of thing we deal with on a daily basis.......

Thursday, 3 April 2014

Virus Warning - CryptoLocker Again

Good morning.

A particularly nasty Ransom-ware Trojan called CryptoLocker which first surfaced in September 2013 has become a serious threat once again.

The ransom-ware is entering peoples email inbox's appearing to be a scanned fax. The attachment is a zipped folder and if opened it will cause serious and potentially unrecoverable damage to your IT system and data.

The safest option is that if you receive any emails contain the word FAX in the subject header with a zip file attached please do NOT open it.

The ransom-ware is activated by the user when they click to open the attachment and in some flavour a countdown timer or Red X will appear on the screen with a message saying your data is being encrypted. You will then be presented with the option to pay a ransom to get your data back; even if you pay the ransom your data will not be decrypted!

This ransom-ware is a real threat and if your system becomes infected there is no way to decrypt your files and you will lose everything unless a backup has been made!

As the ransom-ware is arriving by email we strongly urge you to be aware of your emails and be careful when opening attachments if they are not from a source you regularly receiving emails with attachments from.

We urge all users to be incredibly vigilant when opening all attachments and if your Anti-Virus protection says that an email or the attachment may include malicious items giving you the option to open it or not please do not open it!

1 comment:

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